>http://www.zdnet.com/microsoft-phasing-out-some-of-its-expression-design-tools-7000009116/
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>For those of us who have danced the Microsoft Dance many times, the writing on the wall should be clear...
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>The XAML oriented UI tools be phased out ( dropped ) and capabilities will be added to the already great (IMHO) VS ... which has increasingly strong support for javascript and HTML5 ( and which has more an more extension for the like of Coffeescript ... )
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>Silverlight is already dropped into the Redmond Oubliette.
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>Finding MS references to XAML and WPF will someday be like looking for pictures of Trotsky or Yezhov in a Stalin era Soviet textbook.
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>This could not be any more clear if that had shot the XAML team on Channel 9 ( and buried them with the Linq to Sql group )
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>And yet 5 years from now there are going to be a bunch of developers feeling "blind-sided" and abandoned.
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>(And others who will wonder if there is a way to port their Foxpro 2.0 Dos screens to jquery-UI or if they can use DBFs in a cloud and still let the user Browse and GO TOP :- ) Some things never change.
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>The VS stack will be a service API and variety of ORM flavors and jquery / html5 all working nicely in VS. No problem using C# and EF as part of the equation with .NET classes handling a lot of heavy lifting on the server side. (and still being able to swap all that out for a non-MS backend)
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>For my money, that's a win. I've been playing with Knockback.js and I'm impressed though it is still a little daunting when I am new to both Knockout and Backbone, but so much of this stuff really makes sense. Really have to shake myself every once in a while to not hang on too hard to things I already know, but man, this stuff is cool ! I have not enjoyed development this much for at least 10 years.

Interesting POV - but you don't seem to be making a distinction between browser based and desktop apps ?

I'm probably a bit biased since a lot of stuff I'm working on is CAD based - and HTML5, never mind how many JS libraries you throw at it has a *long* way to go. SIlverlight, if it had proper cross-platform capability, would be streets ahead - but it doesn't so you are probably right in saying it is on the way down.

For native apps on Windows I still think WPF is a great platform. Even if there are no futher releases it's not easy to see ways in which it might be improved. Maybe better UI tools but functionality-wise it's pretty much there.

And isn't XAML alive and well in Win8 ?